Thoughts on Money

Small Planet Institute co-founder Anna Lappé once said:

“Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”

The world is split between those who don't know how to start making money and those who don't know when to stop.

But consumption smoothing pays homage to an existential reality: Life itself is the ultimate scarce asset. The future is unknowable, and religiously maintaining a double-digit savings rate through the worst squalls of life is not of the utmost importance.

“conventional budgeting methods rely on restriction, discipline, and perfectionism in a way that doesn’t work for people. They ignore an important truth about money: it’s meant to be spent.”

Neither he nor the others feel that the hunched shoulders and housing insecurity of their youth were good for their art. The “La Bohème” portrait of impoverished painters and poets was after all a description, not a prescription. “And at least they could afford the garret,” Jacobs-Jenkins says. “In New York, forget it.”

I have great control of my money when I am earning it. I have zero control of my money when I am not.

Risk isn’t a measure of negative consequences. It’s a measure of uncertainty. And the issue with minimizing risk is that while we protect our downside, we prevent ourselves from achieving any sort of meaningful upside. In this way, risk minimization isn’t an insurance policy as much as it is a collar, and the cost of protecting our downside is the... See more